I’m a day behind on this story, but I think it’s an important one to weigh in on. Yesterday Bob Nutting talked to Rob Biertempfel at the Trib, saying that he’d like Andrew McCutchen to be a Pirate for a “long, long time” and Biertempfel’s sources indicated that while the Pirates are not actively engaged in extension talks […]

John Holdzkom started 2014 in independent ball and at one point in the season got cut by his indy league team. He has pitched for New Zealand’s World Baseball Classic team. One time he called in to Chelsea Peretti’s podcast, lamenting his blown baseball opportunity. The Pirates signed him out of the blue last summer, […]

With most of the early spring training talk about the Pirates being extremely positive, their bullpen is sort of the elephant in the room. Obviously Tony Watson and Mark Melancon are great and John Holdzkom was promising down the stretch last year, but the Bucs’ bullpen blew a lot of leads last year. They did […]

This is what I think is great about Jared Hughes: there’s an awfully good chance that he’s walking proof that the Pirates’ front office is a step ahead of most analysis about the relationship between pitching and defense. Over the course of his Pirate career, Hughes has pitched in 170 games and thrown 183 innings. […]

We are headed into murky territory for the < 500 series, as I’m not sure I have anywhere near 500 words to say about the players left to talk about. Still, I’m going to press on for at least a little longer. The upside is that if these posts are short, the possibility exists that […]

One of the nasty little side-effects of the Information Age is that a day that used to feel magical — the day pitchers and catchers report — is now one of the biggest anti-climaxes on the calendar. If you follow the

Andrew McCutchen, writing at the Player’s Tribune: Baseball used to be the sport where all you needed was a stick and a ball. It used to be a way out for poor kids. Now it’s a sport that increasingly freezes out kids whose parents don’t have the income to finance the travel baseball circuit. McCutchen […]

In his two seasons as a Pirate, Mark Melancon has this line: 142 IP, 111 H, 30 R, 26 ER, 19 BB, 141 K, 3 HR This is so good that it’s borderline comical. Three home runs and 19 walks in 142 innings? Out of every pitcher in baseball that’s thrown at least 100 innings […]

When I’m trying to figure out what a young or an unproven player will do in a coming season, most of the time I’ll try to find some sort of statistical signifier that points in one direction or another: Josh Harrison’s xBABIP, Gerrit Cole’s short stretches of dominance, etc. For Gregory Polanco, the argument is […]

In Charlie Wilmoth’s Dry Land (a great read to prep yourself for spring training if you didn’t read it last year!), he’s got an interview with former Indianapolis Indians’ play-by-play guy Scott McCauley where Scott talks about how Pirate fans would obsess over minor league players in a way that sort of befuddled every other minor league broadcaster that he’d ever […]

Besides Gerrit Cole, the two players that will have the most bearing on whether the 2015 Pirates are a good team or a great team are most likely their corner outfielders. Just like you can track the club’s mad dash in August and September to the NL’s second wild card with Gerrit Cole’s return from the disabled […]

Spring training is quickly approaching with the Super Bowl behind us, but the Pirates are not done making minor roster moves to get ready for the coming season. Last night they picked up Steve Lombardozzi from the Orioles for cash in move unrelated to the Travis Snider trade, and today

I’m not sure any player validates the whole Neal Huntington front office approach quite as much as Jordy Mercer. That seems like a crazy place to start, so bear with me. Mercer was a third-round pick in 2008, drafted one round after Chase d’Arnaud (correction: Mercer was drafted one round before d’Arnaud, but I’ll hold to […]

The Pittsburgh Pirates continue to be on the rise after back-to-back playoff appearances in 2013 and 2014. The Pirates finished second in the National League Central Division and claimed a Wild Card spot, before losing to the eventual World Series champion San Francisco Giants, ending their postseason. But positivity is in the air, as the […]

One of the first questions that I often get about WHYGAVS is “Where did the name Where Have You Gone, Andy Van Slyke? come from?” When I’m in a particularly eloquent mood, I tend to answer that the name just kind of popped into my head when I decided to start a Pirate blog, and that I liked it because of the way that it (to me, at least) perfectly evokes the idea that nothing can ever be quite like watching sports and having a favorite player when you’re five or six or seven or eight years old. I don’t know if that’s exactly what I was thinking when I decided to become a 20-year old baseball blogger, but that’s certainly what it all means to me now that I’m ten years older.

In that vein, Ted Anthony wrote this wonderful story at Medium about his eight-year old son, his son’s love of Travis Snider, and the heartbreak that comes from a trade that looks minor to pretty much everybody else. It’s easy to evaluate a trade from a financial ledger or a sabermetric spreadsheet, but it’s much tougher to think about it as someone’s favorite player being sent away or as someone’s connection to home being severed just a little bit more. In the end, though, are any of us baseball fans without our own personal Travis Sniders? Anyway, go read the whole piece.